Godwin Obaseki’s shame

By Joseph Edgar…

If you have not seen the video circulating on the internet, consider yourself lucky. For the images portend very graphically the continued disgrace and malaise we continue to fcce as a result of poor vision occasioned by a deliberate weak selection process in leadership.

Still hoping, you have not seen the video, let me take you through the visage. So the Nigerian, looking for where to park his vehicle in the middle of a torrential rain fall, stumbles on what he thinks is an abandoned school compound. But to his chagrin and surprise, it is a real live school with children drenched in the torrential rainfall waiting for it to subside before they continue with their classes. With no teachers in sight removing adult supervision, the children cuddle themselves trying to keep warm as they find excitement in the midst of their pernicious situation.

The young Nigerian who is filming this is shocked and his visage immediately turns into anger as he tours the dilapidated school that begins to look and feel like a war torn zone. He screams into the camera at the poor leadership and apparent wickedness of our leaders who continue to wallow in hedonistic pleasure in the middle of this apparent and vagrant waste.

This is the shame of he who has made himself the Governor and those who put him there. A curse. For one who prides himself as an Investment banker with a cosmopolitan outlook, this is to say the least a shameful display of a lack of capacity in identifying areas of immediate need and putting in place a structure of intervention that would engage the issues that pervade his state.

For me, this footage should trigger a resignation or an impeachment notice but in this clime, nothing of such would happen but instead, there would be the usual cosmetic attempt at papering the matter and then it would all blow away.

You see, governance is not by force nor is it a miracle, if not for peculiar pedestrian urges, people like Obaseki really do not have any business in governance.

What you see there is at best a brilliant theoretician without the pragmatic nuances needed to positively impact on the people. This is not an Ambode type energy, nor an Akpabio type of visionary, this is a ‘’mumu’’ type servitude to the grandiosity of power for itself and not what it could be used for as we seek the transformation of the people.

So am I shocked? Of course not. All you need to do is to go back to his pedigree. A failed Investment banker running a second grade investment banking franchise that ran into very serious turbulence and which most likely led to his temporary exit risking funds of thousands of Nigerians and needing serious institutional support and on the back of that a foray into government riding on meaningless theoretical postulations. Today, Edo State is saddled with a wimpy, bespectacled caricature of a leader who has remained an effigy of uselessness.

Those children daily risk their lives in seeking a future, millions of Edo Indigenes go through daily humiliation and suffering in an attempt to eke out a living while the Governor and his ilk continue to parade themselves in borrowed robes, speaking from both sides of their mouth and postulating meaningless theories in a shameless orgy of grandstanding.

Well, there is God as mummy once said and it is only a matter of time. You just wait and see, a matter of time.

Thank you.

 

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